Why is Twitter’s Growth Stalling?

Twitter did not add any new users in Q2 2017 despite daily tweets from the POTUS. The total number of users for Quarter 2, 2017 was reported as 328 million users, a figure that remains unchanged from Quarter 1, 2017.

Twitter hasn’t been able to substantially add new users for quite some time now, despite its constant mention in popular culture.

Twitter has only added only 26 million new users to its platform since Quarter 1, 2015 whilst other Social Media platforms like Instagram and Snapchathave grown exponentially in the same period.

Why The Stall in Growth?

We believe Twitter’s stalled growth is due to the product itself. Twitter has been slow to change.

The concept of Twitter is fairly difficult to grasp for new users. The less intuitive, majorly text-based platform makes it less intriguing to attract new comers in an era where most social media platforms offer exciting content and are very easy to use.

Another factor is that Twitter conversations happen on Twitter.

When advertisers spend money on ads, they expect to drive traffic to their products or websites. The thing with Twitter is a lot of conversations happen on site and users rarely leave the site to check third party sites. This provides very little ROI to advertisers compared to other platforms like Facebook.

Twitter has also done very little to deal with abuse and trolling on its platform. There has been several incidents of abuse and trolling on Twitter but little has been done to curb these incidents. The most recent incident was singer Ed Sheeran quitting Twitter after being trolled for his appearance in an episode of Game of Thrones Season 7.

Ed Sheeran has deleted his twitter account following all the hateful and awful messages he has received from trolls